I have toured it a few times on family days. Pretty impressive. The most interesting part to me is the seed laser is smaller than a pencil and has less power than a laser pointer. The flash panels amplify it.

SN1987a goes boom:Wait...then how is this the most powerful laser in the world? I think UT has one that goes above 1E15 W. Is the metric in Energy per burst?

UT's petawatt laser is indeed claimed to be the most powerful in terms of Watts (~200J, ~100 femtoseconds -> 2E15 W)...But TFA calls the NIF laser the largest... It would be the most powerful if the metric was J.s (units of action), or the number of beams...

wjllope:SN1987a goes boom: Wait...then how is this the most powerful laser in the world? I think UT has one that goes above 1E15 W. Is the metric in Energy per burst?

UT's petawatt laser is indeed claimed to be the most powerful in terms of Watts (~200J, ~100 femtoseconds -> 2E15 W)...But TFA calls the NIF laser the largest... It would be the most powerful if the metric was J.s (units of action), or the number of beams...

BTW - re: your handle....I was an undergraduate the the university of michigan and was making beer money changing tapes and running simple analysis tasks with the IMB group there.

I still remember clearly the excitement when the major players in this group were all giddy because the IMB detector saw the neutrinos from SN1987A. I can still picture the plot in my head even now. Eight little X's (it was the kind of plot a line printer makes, not the polished postscript that modern analysis codes now make) near the bottom of the plot frame...